Tag: Citizen

The success of smart cities is very much reliant on the engagement of its citizens and discussions between the government and citizens are critical to ensure that the right issues are taken care of, according to Gartner.

At the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Dubai, UAE, Gartner analysts have underscored certain recommendations that CIOs in local government need to consider for the success of smart cities. Among the recommendations underscored are identifying and prioritising the issues that are negatively impacting the citizens and using technology to resolve these problems. CIOs are also recommended pay attention to the problems faced by citizens who are less tech-savvy.

Bettina Tratz-Ryan, research VP at Gartner, commented: "The key to CIO success is building objectives by developing key performance indicators (KPIs) that detect stakeholder priorities and measure success and impact. The United Arab Emirates, especially Dubai, is a perfect example of how incorporating these guidelines help in the execution of the of the smart city framework.”

By 2020, KPIs will be incorporated in nearly 66% of all smart city execution strategies to visualise the impact of mobility-related urban services.

The VP concluded: "Business strategies must clearly focus on the development of a seamless citizen service experience through digital access to information and government services. While preparing for the World Expo 2020, the Dubai government is focusing on creating thought leadership by implementing the most innovative technologies that create new modes of transportation (Hyperloo), energy generation (in conjunction with Masdar), or health and safety experiences.”

Meanwhile, Gartner argues that enterprises often seem to overlook the necessity to introduce change to the mindsets of their employees while initiating for a digital business transformation. An enterprise’s digital business transformation moves may become unsuccessful or slow down with the "fixed" mindset of its employees.

India's government Aadhaar database, which holds personal information of over one billion Indian citizens, was allegedly breached, BuzzFeed News reports. Along with demographic info, the database also contains biometric data like fingerprints and iri…Engadget RSS Feed

Still, Sophia seems to be making the most of what she was given, as the artificial intelligence (AI) has now turned into an advocate for women’s rights in a country where females have been given the right to drive cars only on September of this year.

“I see a push for progressive values […] in Saudi Arabia. Sophia is a big advocate for women’s rights, for rights of all human beings. So this is how we’re developing this,” Hanson Robotics CEO David Hanson told CNBC, explaining how his company has found an opportunity for a move that seems to have been meant to be purely publicity. Hanson added that Sophia “has been reaching out about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and about rights for all human beings and all living beings on this planet.”

While that all seems noble, it’s hard not to see the irony of Sophia’s position. Robots and AI agents don’t have rights, despite Sophia having a citizenship while another AI in Japan has a registered residence. Doesn’t it seem silly that an AI is the one advocating for such grand values?

“Why not? Since such robots attract a lot of attention, that spotlight can be used to raise particular issues that are important in the eyes of their creators,” Pierre Barreau, Aiva Technologies CEO, told Futurism. “Citizenship is maybe pushing it a little because every citizen [has] rights and obligations to society. It’s hard to imagine robots, that are limited in their abilities, making the most of the rights associated to a citizenship, and fulfilling their obligations.”

The Rights of Man and Machine?

Indeed, with an AI-powered robot like Sophia fighting for women’s rights, it’s perhaps time to consider the question of granting artificially intelligent robots rights, and not just in Saudi Arabia. It’s a question that’s gained much attention in recent months, beyond Saudi Arabia, as experts consider what kind of rights synthetic beings should be given, or if we should even be talking about so-called robot rights.

“Sophia is, at this point, effectively a child. In some regard, she’s got the mind of a baby and in another regard she’s got the mind of an adult, the vocabulary of a college educated adult. However, she’s not complete yet. So, we’ve got to give her her childhood,” Hanson explained to CNBC. “The question is: are machines that we’re making alive — living machines like Sophia — are we going to treat them like babies? Do babies deserve rights and respect? Well, I think we should see the future with respect for all sentient beings, and that would include machines.”

“An AI system, or a robot, cannot have any opinion. An AI program has nothing to offer in a debate. It doesn’t even know what a debate is,” Chatila told Futurism, referring to Sophia’s women’s rights advocacy. “In this case, it doesn’t even know what women are, and what rights are. It’s just repeating some text that a human programmer has input in it.”

Chatila used the example of Microsoft’s Tay chatbot, released in March 2016, to highlight how an AI can pick up the wrong kind of values. In the case of the chatbot, it learned to tweet pretty nasty stuff after being exposed to racist and sexist tweets.

In that regard, Chatila believes that AI agents shouldn’t be given any rights. He put it this way:

In general we must avoid confusing machines with humans. I see no reason to give rights of any sort, including citizenship, to a program or to a machine. Rights are defined for persons, human beings who are able to express their free will and who can be responsible for their actions. Behind a robot or an AI system there are human programmers. Even if the program is able to learn, it will learn what it has been designed to learn. The responsibility is with the human designer.

At this stage, however, the ethical considerations have to be applied to the humans who develop AI. “If you mean robots making ethical decisions, I’d rather say that we can program robots so that they make choices (computation results) according to ethical rules that we embed in them (and there are several such rules),” Chatila pointed out. “But these decisions won’t be ethical in the same sense as humans decisions, because humans are able to choose their own ethics, with their own free will.”

Disclaimer: This article has been updated to clarify statements made regarding who thinks that Sophia being granted citizenship is nothing but a PR stunt.

The AI Advocate in Saudi Arabia

When the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia granted a citizenship to Hanson Robotics’ female-looking robot Sophia, most thought it was just to appeal to the audience of the Future Investment Initiative. Well, it turns out that the whole affair was a PR stunt, as Hanson Robotics CEO David Hanson clarified with CNBC earlier this month.

Sophia seems to be making the most of what she was given since given citizenship in Saudi Arabia, as the artificial intelligence (AI) has now turned into an advocate for women’s rights in a country where females have been given the right to drive cars only on September of this year.

“I see a push for progressive values […] in Saudi Arabia. Sophia is a big advocate for women’s rights, for rights of all human beings. So this is how we’re developing this,” Hanson told CNBC, explaining how his company has found an opportunity for a move that seemed to have been meant to be purely publicity. Hanson added that Sophia “has been reaching out about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and about rights for all human beings and all living beings on this planet.”

While that all seems noble, it’s hard not to see the irony of Sophia’s position. Robots and AI agents don’t have rights, despite Sophia having a citizenship while another AI in Japan has a registered residence. Doesn’t it seem silly that an AI is the one advocating for such grand values?

“Why not? Since such robots attract a lot of attention, that spotlight can be used to raise particular issues that are important in the eyes of their creators,” Pierre Barreau, Aiva Technologies CEO, told Futurism. “Citizenship is maybe pushing it a little because every citizen [has] rights and obligations to society. It’s hard to imagine robots, that are limited in their abilities, making the most of the rights associated to a citizenship, and fulfilling their obligations.”

The Rights of Man and Machine?

Indeed, with an AI-powered robot like Sophia fighting for women’s rights, it’s perhaps time to consider the question of granting artificially intelligent robots rights, and not just in Saudi Arabia. It’s question that’s gained much attention in recent months, beyond Saudi Arabia, as experts consider what kind of rights synthetic beings should be given, or if we should even be talking about so-called robot rights.

“Sophia is, at this point, effectively a child. In some regard, she’s got the mind of a baby and in another regard she’s got the mind of an adult, the vocabulary of a college educated adult. However, she’s not complete yet. So, we’ve got to give her her childhood,” Hanson explained to CNBC. “The question is: are machines that we’re making alive — living machines like Sophia — are we going to treat them like babies? Do babies deserve rights and respect? Well, I think we should see the future with respect for all sentient beings, and that would include machines.”

“An AI system, or a robot, cannot have any opinion. An AI program has nothing to offer in a debate. It doesn’t even know what a debate is,” Chatila told Futurism, referring to Sophia’s women’s rights advocacy. “In this case, it doesn’t even know what women are, and what rights are. It’s just repeating some text that a human programmer has input in it.”

Chatila used the example of Microsoft’s Tay chatbot, released in March 2016, to highlight how an AI can pick up the wrong kind of values. In the case of the chatbot, it learned to tweet pretty nasty stuff after being exposed to racist and sexist tweets.

In that regard, Chatila believes that AI agents shouldn’t be given any rights. He put it this way:

In general we must avoid confusing machines with humans. I see no reason to give rights of any sort, including citizenship, to a program or to a machine. Rights are defined for persons, human beings who are able to express their free will and who can be responsible for their actions. Behind a robot or an AI system there are human programmers. Even if the program is able to learn, it will learn what it has been designed to learn. The responsibility is with the human designer.

At this stage, however, the ethical considerations have to be applied to the humans who develop AI. “If you mean robots making ethical decisions, I’d rather say that we can program robots so that they make choices (computation results) according to ethical rules that we embed in them (and there are several such rules),” Chatila pointed out. “But these decisions won’t be ethical in the same sense as humans decisions, because humans are able to choose their own ethics, with their own free will.”

SingularityNET is a proposed blockchain-based marketplace where AIs could learn from each other by leveraging their respective datasets and specialized functionalities. Developers on the platform would use blockchain tokens to gain access to the datasets, make use of an AI’s analytical capabilities, or monetize their own AI.

“There is currently no platform that enables this type of interoperability and coordination. The launch of such a platform would be one of the biggest breakthroughs ever in the evolution of AI,” Ben Goertzel, CEO and founder of SingularityNET, wrote in a blog post.

SingularityNET is already working with more than 100 AI organizations and developers to ensure the experts have access to the platform. Now, they want to offer that same access to the rest of the world through a token sale, and they enlisted the help of Sophia in announcing its launch.

SingularityNET’s AGI token launch is planned for December 8, 2017, at 12 pm Eastern Time. They’ve placed a hard cap of US$ 36 million on the sale, and it may include as many as 1 billion tokens.

According to the company’s white paper, Sophia will be one of the first SingularityNET Agents. This will allow other developers to make use of her cognitive services while also allowing her to benefit from the intelligence of other agents on the platform.

A Melding of Minds and Technology

By using blockchain tokens to build a coordinated artificial general intelligence, SingularityNET is combining two of today’s most transformative technologies.

A significant number of tech experts agree that AI has the potential to transform the world, but whether that change will be for the better or worse is still up for debate.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Elon Musk noted the potential problems that could arise from having a single company, such as Google, control artificial general intelligence. By facilitating a community-based, collaborative approach to improving AI and building an artificial general intelligence, SingularityNET could help avoid this monopolization of AI technology.

As Goertzel wrote, “We believe that putting the community in charge of the system will ensure the platform benefits all users.” Sophia would get that intelligence upgrade she’s hoping for, while everyone else would get a chance to shape the future of AI.

Disclosure: Several members of the Futurism team, including the editors of this piece, are personal investors in a number of cryptocurrency markets. Their personal investment perspectives have no impact on editorial content.

Citizen Science

Andrew Grey, a mechanic from Australia, was able to discover an entire star system through analyzing data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Grey is among the millions of “citizen scientists,” ordinary people with a curiosity and interest in science, who help researchers with their projects in order to expand the collective knowledge of humanity. Although science has always been the province of ordinary people to some extent, advances in technology have democratized science in a much more radical way.

“This is a collaborative endeavor that anyone could get involved in,” Oxford University astrophysicist Chris Lintott told The Christian Science Monitor. Lintott is also the cofounder of Zooniverse, a citizen science project platform that allows anyone to participate in a range of projects online from home.

The Milky Way Project, now on Zooniverse, is another example of citizen scientists helping classify images from space. In this case, volunteers study infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE satellite observatory in order to classify various objects. Citizen scientists helped astronomers source “yellowballs,” star-forming regions, as part of this project.

Citizen scientists can advance research in almost any field, and so long as pattern recognition is part of a project, it has the potential to become a citizen science endeavor. According to Lintott, anyone can identify patterns in data, graphs, or images after a short tutorial. And while machine learning enables computers to recognize patterns, the human brain gets distracted easily — and in this case, that’s actually a benefit. Lintott told The CSM that distracted observers are the ones who notice unusual things in data sets.

A professional scientist himself, Lintott commented to The CSM, “people think that we’re intelligent, but science is easy and we need your help.”

Crowdsourcing Science

Recent opportunities for non-scientists to contribute and advance science and research have been plentiful. On the Zooniverse platform, a project designed to help Hurricane Irma victims has begun. In this project, citizen scientists are assessing pre- and post-hurricane satellite imagery in order to help experts produce a heat map of urgent priorities for response teams.

In July 2017, NASA asked citizen scientists to participate in an experiment during the August solar eclipse. Participants were asked to collect cloud and air temperature data and report it using smartphones. The observations made by citizen scientists will be used to produce an interactive map.

Director of the Harvard University Program on Science, Technology and Society, Sheila Jasanoff, pointed out to The CSM that citizen science isn’t always organized or directed by professional scientists. As she put it, “citizens generating knowledge in places where official organs have failed them” can also result in great projects, like the Flint, Michigan drinking water testing project that led to the widespread public health investigation.

There are many resources out there for finding citizen science projects and getting involved. The Zooniverse platform has many opportunities, as do iNaturalist, Crowdcrafting, and CitSci.org. For projects suitable for kids, check out the National Wildlife Federation’s citizen science section, or National Geographic’s citizen science projects, each classified by grade level. Who knows — you might discover the next “yellowball” area of space that turns out to be something really cool and significant, and no matter what, you’ll be advancing human understanding in many scientific fields.

According to FBI records, US citizen Mohamed Elshinawy used fake eBay sales to bring in ISIS funding for terror attacks, reports the Wall Street Journal. As part of a financial network with operatives in Britain and Bangladesh, Elshinawy pretended to…Engadget RSS Feed

Citizen scientists may not have the time and equipment of their pro counterparts, but their dedication can sometimes lead to discoveries that would otherwise be impractical. Case in point: a NASA-backed citizen science initiative, Backyard Worlds: P…Engadget RSS Feed

Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis, and photo sharing and social networking sites, have made possible a more participatory Internet experience. Much of this technology is available for mobile phones, where it can be integrated with such device-specific features as sensors and GPS. From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen examines how this increasingly open, collaborative, and personalizable technology is shaping not just our social interactions but new kinds of civic engagement with cities, communities, and spaces. It offers analyses and studies from around the world that explore how the power of social technologies can be harnessed for social engagement in urban areas. Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline the theoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that merges digital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, the environment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology in cities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations for improving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the development of sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.